Writing to you may seem like a validation of rhetoric, but it’s not my intention. I’ve been wondering why anyone thinks it’s OK to convince others of anything, how anybody can decide what’s on and off the table, dead and alive, possible and impossible. This stuff isn’t really decided anyway, is it?

People can persuade and cajole, declare and suggest, regardless of what one thinks, feels and knows to be bad or good, real and unreal, despite what one claims to be right or wrong, and so many do, don’t they?

What’s at stake in believing in you? Is it the nature of reality, the laws of the universe? Is morality a default condition of your strictures, a mirroring of the limitations set by argument?

Is everything a question of belief? Is this a rhetorical question?

Is there more than will at play in the way things go?

Existence doesn’t need understanding. It doesn’t negotiate with our social preoccupations, our archives and in-fighting, our willingness to lie to one another and deny our complicity in each others lies.

Actuality could care less.

I suspect people can forget themselves — selves defined by conspiracies of lying — when their utility and value as political raw material has been stripped away, when rhetoric is no longer designed for them, when they’re of no consequence within wars of consensus, when they wake up outside of the Polis.

I imagine everyone moving beyond a periphery. It might feel like a return, a homecoming, to a place that isn’t marginal. We’d be off all maps, powerless. You wouldn’t exist. There would be no containing metaphors to represent our negation, our erasure. There’d be no one left to devise them.

We wouldn’t know how to describe ourselves (even to ourselves). We wouldn’t be capable of giving up or in.